First Draft Fiction: Fear of Beauty, Part 1

In a world crying out for stories, this author makes an attempt. Unrefined and unedited, we make no promises of high quality, but you can’t beat the price.

Fall

A shaft of sunlight broke through the tall pines along a dirt road. The light shone through the windows of a dingy white colonial, illuminating the old windows smeared with fingerprints, motes swirling in the air.

Rebecca surveyed the wreckage of another morning strewn out on the floor in the harsh, late summer sun. Jack had been up early again, a shrieking cry rousing Rebecca from sleep long before the sun was up. The morning had unfolded as usual, Jack disemboweling cabinets, scattering raisins and Cheerios on the Persian rugs and in every nook and cranny of the old floorboards as he stumbled around in the semi-darkness, refusing to go back to sleep. Rebecca sighed looking at the mess, running a hand over her brown curls, once beautiful, now unkempt and snarled. Before facing the mess, she decided to get dressed for the day.

How different life in Vermont looked than she had pictured. Last year, when she and Brian talked about the move, they had envisioned a quaint New England life, pretty family moments amid cozy surroundings. The drive up from Philadelphia had been filled with anticipation, the first sight of the idyllic rental property had awed Rebecca. It had looked just perfect. Two miles from the campus where Brian would be teaching and doing research, Rebecca imagined walks around the college, long lunches between Brian’s classes, happy memories of father and son tossing a ball in the lush green fields beyond the campus grounds.

What Rebecca had not considered was the stunning contrast between the urban life she relished in Philly and the lonely reality of being a professor’s wife in an isolated, little town on a hill in the middle of the woods of Vermont. In the city, Rebecca had spent her pregnancy and Jack’s babyhood attending classes, workshops, outings, and picnics, baby yoga library classes and outdoor cafes with other new mothers with babies. She had spent entire days out of the apartment, bouncing Jack to sleep in a baby carrier or pushing a stroller through the park until he finally succumbed to a nap. He was so fussy that staying in the one-bedroom apartment and forcing the neighbors to listen to his wails was intolerable. Rebecca preferred to stay out, mounting the winding stairs to the third floor only after a full day, Jack falling into a slumber by the time they reached the landing with their door.

With the constant whirlwind of activity, Rebecca had not noticed how occupied Brian was. Their courtship had been brief and intense, filled with luxurious picnics on plaid blankets, poetry readings, fine wine. Brian pursued her with the singlemindedness he now applied to his career: book, various articles, faculty luncheons, and conferences out of state. Rebecca had thought the long dates and breathtaking romance had been the beginning of a lifetime; she didn’t realize it a focused campaign that won Brian a wife he thought was now securely in his grasp, his continued attention no longer needed.

All this had not occurred to Rebecca in the busy days of hefting Jack up steep staircases and strolling through public parks, nursing him on benches and in the corner of a busy coffee shop. Only in the dull quiet of life down a dirt road, friendless and unemployed did Rebecca recognize how much she and Brian had drifted into different depths. Brian plunged ever deeper into literary interests, academic connections; Rebecca, still all but dissertation and unlikely ever to finish, swam in the shallows of toddlerhood, home décor, and cheap novels read for amusement.

She passed him in the hall on the way to get dressed. He rushed past tying his bowtie, a book stuffed with loose papers under one arm.

“I’ll be late tonight. Special dinner with the dean. This could be an important one,” Brian called shortly as he bounded down the stairs, stepping over the toys and Tupperware Jack had trailed across the house.

“Okay, I’ll try to wait up!” Rebecca said, trying to feign enthusiasm.

“Don’t bother. You need your sleep if this kid is going to be waking you up at four every morning,” Brian said, glancing at his wife for the first time that morning, irritation creeping into his voice.

Rebecca made no reply as she went to find her clothes, eyes heavy with lingering sleepiness.

Dressed, hair mostly tamed into a loose bun, Rebecca tried to give the day a fresh start, determined to make the most of it. For someone who had spent so little time in her own home, being stuck, jobless in a rural outpost was a shock. But it had its nice features. A previous renter had planted bulbs along the old stone wall, and Rebecca reveled in cutting fresh blooms, carrying armfuls of flowers into the house and arranging them. She had to put them up high or Jack would try to eat the delicate flowers, pollen smearing between his fingers and across his nose.

Rebecca dressed Jack in overalls, as she did most days. There was something irresistible about a two-year-old boy in corduroy or denim, playing in the woods or dragging toy trucks around the yard. The pictures Rebecca had taken looked like a calm and curated life: tow-haired Jack in his overalls, her carefully arranged pitchers of fresh flowers, the afternoon sun shining through the trees on the other side of the stone wall. Scrolling through the photos late at night, Rebecca was stunned by the beauty, a feeling of looking into someone else’s life haunted her. What she felt as she captured those stunning images was emptiness.

In such isolation, neighbors, however distant, became a fascination. Who were they? Where did they go when they rumbled down the dirt road, a cloud of dust billowing behind their car?

The woman was the one who was out most. Her white bob trimmed neatly and pulled back from her face with a headband most days. She was an active woman, the wife of a retired professor, Rebecca was able to piece together after talking to people in town.

The old professor was much harder to spot. Where his wife was a steady flow of activity, in and out of the house, he was a recluse, venturing out only to meticulously trim the edges of the yard, weed the ornate gardens, and move rocks along the wall. For a house that lay at the end of a secluded dirt road, the obsessive attention to appearance was clearly a private preoccupation that had little to do with how the house looked to outsiders, a point of personal pride alone.

Rebecca ran into the woman at the town hall when she registered her car. She introduced herself with a cool reserve as Beverly Harris. “Gene and I have been at the college for years. We just love it up on the hill,” she said with a smile that did not touch her eyes. Not inviting further conversation, she smiled slightly down at Jack and walked away.

Rebecca finally met Gene after several months of walking the winding trails through the woods around the two houses. There were some fallen trees that Jack liked climbing. Whether the trees were on the Harris’ property or theirs was undetermined, but there seemed little chance of this becoming a point of contention. Long after Brian had headed to campus and Beverly had trundled down the road to one of her volunteering tasks at the local school or Red Cross, Rebecca took Jack out into the woods.

The air was turning brisk, and Rebecca had had to bring out heavy sweaters that morning to meet the growing autumn chill. She felt light and free as she sent Jack down the path in front of her, knowing that a few hours of vigorous fresh air would mean her active boy would collapse for a two-hour nap by the early afternoon.

Rebecca never would have thought her life would be so dull and microscopic. Raised by an attorney and an accountant, she had assumed that she would bill by the hour. And she had maintained professional occupation for Jack’s first year, squeezing in work at their university for professors and grad students when Jack slept. Her interest had dwindled, and after the move, she could not bring herself to seek out work and meet deadlines. She felt like Jack after a day of fresh air, utterly exhausted, spent in a rush of outdoor activity, useless for anything else. Less and less she followed Brian’s research interests in obscure editions of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Early in their marriage, she couldn’t wait to hear every aspect of Brian’s thought, contributing eagerly where she could. Now, she wanted only to watch Jack, work with her hands, sleep when the day was done.

The semester’s faculty family dinner had confirmed how altered Rebecca had become with respect to her husband’s work. Rebecca had become quiet and withdrawn meeting the Andersons, a literary powerhouse, married couple with competing research interests who spurred each other on. Lillian Anderson was thin and agitated, clearly, Rebecca thought, uninterested in her toddler girl the same age as Jack, pushing her aside to jump into the academic discussion with the other faculty members.

“How do you manage your daughter while you teach?” Rebecca asked during a lull in the conversation, unable to restrain her morbid curiosity.

“Oh, I make Stan watch her in the morning. That’s my best writing time, naturally. Then for my classes we have an au pair. It is a real bargain as far as childcare goes because they live with you. There are some ridiculous constraints as far as the number of hours you can actually use them, but if you get a good one, they will kind of look the other way. Afterall, we’re paying for her room and board! The best part is that Aurora is learning French. We’re thrilled with it, really. And what do you do?”

Rebecca was surprised to hear herself describe lamely how she was “just finishing up” her dissertation on Milton and how she had a “deep interest” in Regency literature as well. Lillian raised a skeptical eyebrow and said, “Stan, too. That is so exciting. You’ll have to talk sometime. Maybe you guys can trade contacts, you know, make introductions. Are you going to the Austen conference in New York next week?”

“Um, no. No one to watch Jack,” Rebecca said lowering her eyes. Lillian bowed out agilely, moving on to a more interesting subject.

Even worse than meeting the dynamic Anderson literary duo was her encounter with the young star of the department, a sophisticated Classics scholar turned award-winning literary critic, rumored to have worked in modeling while finishing her PhD in Oxford. Rebecca saw in Stephanie all her evaporated aspirations, the embodiment of all her failures.

Brooding over whether she should feel guilty for her simple life and uninteresting reading taste of recent months as they wound their way into the woods, Rebecca did not look up in time to see her neighbor walking back and forth along the edge of their yard. Before she noticed him, Jack was on top of him, babbling away, startling Rebecca and the neighbor, who was clearly also lost in thought.

“Sorry! Didn’t see you there,” mumbled the man who must be Eugene Harris. He sheepishly caught Rebecca’s eye as he rubbed out a cigarette on the stone wall. “Disgusting habit. When I get stuck in my writing I sometimes just need a smoke and nothing else will do.” After a pause, he gallantly extended his hand, “I’m Gene. What brings you to my woods?”

“Your woods? I thought this was just the woods. I’m sorry. I’ve been bringing my son Jack up here for months. I didn’t know it was yours. We live in the rental on the other side of the trees down there.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Gene said dismissively, “We’re not using the trees for anything, and I’ve seen your boy seems to really like it.”

“You’ve seen me out here? How embarrassing. I just didn’t know. I’m Rebecca Marshall, by the way,” she added, finally realizing she had never met Gene’s extended greeting with her name. “My husband Brian Marshall is the new English professor at the college. That’s why we moved here. And what do you teach?”

“Oh, yes, I heard there was a new lit guy. History. I taught history for 30 years. Now I’m just finishing up my book on monastic development of the Late Middle Ages. I rarely make it to campus now. Too loud; I’ve collected all the works I need here and prefer to write in solitude. But my passion is literature. I couldn’t let myself study it; reading stories in your own language isn’t a real discipline I always thought, no offense to your husband.”

“Brian would be outraged. You’ll have to have it out with him over dinner sometime. Tell you wife; we’d love to have you over.”

“I’ll do that. You’d better go catch up with that boy of yours. He’s already on the other side of the creek. I’d better get back to work anyway. Pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Marshall.”

Rebecca smiled and waved mutely, visibly disappointed the interaction ended so suddenly, so starved for conversation as she was. She turned and followed after Jack, glancing over her shoulder to watch Gene retreat past the flowerbeds, a last riot of color in the fall air, soon to collapse into deathly sleep for the winter.

After that morning, Gene and Rebecca met regularly along the dirt road and forest paths. They exchanged pleasantries, swapped book recommendations, and enjoyed companionship for which they were both longing, however unacknowledged their need was. Jack always smiled toothily when he spotted Gene, racing across the distance between them to grab him around the knee in an awkward toddler embrace. Gene never seemed to mind but he did not seem interested in Jack, preferring to view him from a distance while he talked to Rebecca.

“We should have the Harrises over for dinner,” Rebecca told Brian one evening as she washed dishes, smiling as she remembered a conversation with Gene that morning.

“Who?” asked Brian, brown furrowed as he made his way through a stack of poorly written undergrad papers.

“The Harrises. The couple down the road. Gene Harris is a history professor. Or was. He’s still writing some book. They seem sweet. We should have them over.”

“Oh, yeah, I heard Gene was still around, though he never comes to campus. Well, invite them over. That’s fine.”

Somehow the weeks passed, fall turned fully to winter, and Rebecca never had a chance to make dinner plans. As the snow began to fall, she didn’t see Gene. She settled into a new rhythm of life in the snowbound woods.

To be continued.